Sharp insight on the compliance theater problem. The chicken-and-egg question you posed reminds me of a similiar dynamic in IoT security: manufacturers wanted buyers to demand it, buyers wanted manufacturers to bake it in. Betting on hospitals as primary buyer makes sense if procurement cycles are the real bottleneck, but my guess is medtech vendors will move first becuase they feel the sales-cycle pain more acutely. Curious how OpenCRO handles the stakeholder translation layer, different langauges for boards versus engineers is no joke.
You’re right that vendors feel the pain first — stalled deals, endless security questionnaires, “come back after budget,” etc. That’s why most movement starts on the vendor side. The problem is that vendors are structurally bad at translating that pain into something hospitals can act on. It turns into compliance theater instead of decision progress.
OpenCRO is deliberately built around the translation layer, not the control itself:
• Same underlying risk graph
• Different projections of it
Roughly:
• Boards / execs see deal risk, timing risk, and revenue impact (“what must be true for this deal to close?”).
• Security / IT see threat paths, mitigations, residual risk.
• Clinical / ops see workflow disruption and blast radius, not CVEs.
• Sales sees which objections are real vs performative and which stakeholders actually matter.
So instead of “security baked in” vs “buyers demand it,” the move is:
make risk legible in the language each stakeholder already uses to say no.
Once that happens, procurement cycles stop being a black box and start looking like a solvable system constraint.
Totally agree the language gap is non-trivial — that’s the whole game, not a footnote.
I agree vendors will likely move first — not because they want better security, but because they feel the sales-cycle drag and pricing pressure immediately. Hospitals feel the risk later; vendors feel the friction now.
The translation layer is the hard part. My working hypothesis is that most deals stall because the same risk is described three different ways:
• probabilistic and architectural for engineers
• operational and financial for execs/boards
• checklist-driven for procurement/compliance
OpenCRO’s core job is to compute a single risk posture and then render it natively for each stakeholder, without turning it into compliance theater.
Still early, but this exact tension is what I’m validating right now.
Sharp insight on the compliance theater problem. The chicken-and-egg question you posed reminds me of a similiar dynamic in IoT security: manufacturers wanted buyers to demand it, buyers wanted manufacturers to bake it in. Betting on hospitals as primary buyer makes sense if procurement cycles are the real bottleneck, but my guess is medtech vendors will move first becuase they feel the sales-cycle pain more acutely. Curious how OpenCRO handles the stakeholder translation layer, different langauges for boards versus engineers is no joke.
That’s exactly the tension.
You’re right that vendors feel the pain first — stalled deals, endless security questionnaires, “come back after budget,” etc. That’s why most movement starts on the vendor side. The problem is that vendors are structurally bad at translating that pain into something hospitals can act on. It turns into compliance theater instead of decision progress.
OpenCRO is deliberately built around the translation layer, not the control itself:
• Same underlying risk graph
• Different projections of it
Roughly:
• Boards / execs see deal risk, timing risk, and revenue impact (“what must be true for this deal to close?”).
• Security / IT see threat paths, mitigations, residual risk.
• Clinical / ops see workflow disruption and blast radius, not CVEs.
• Sales sees which objections are real vs performative and which stakeholders actually matter.
So instead of “security baked in” vs “buyers demand it,” the move is:
make risk legible in the language each stakeholder already uses to say no.
Once that happens, procurement cycles stop being a black box and start looking like a solvable system constraint.
Totally agree the language gap is non-trivial — that’s the whole game, not a footnote.
This is exactly the right analogy.
I agree vendors will likely move first — not because they want better security, but because they feel the sales-cycle drag and pricing pressure immediately. Hospitals feel the risk later; vendors feel the friction now.
The translation layer is the hard part. My working hypothesis is that most deals stall because the same risk is described three different ways:
• probabilistic and architectural for engineers
• operational and financial for execs/boards
• checklist-driven for procurement/compliance
OpenCRO’s core job is to compute a single risk posture and then render it natively for each stakeholder, without turning it into compliance theater.
Still early, but this exact tension is what I’m validating right now.
Excellent analysis! This breakdown in cybersecurity incentives highlights the need for a more system level design approach, not just compliance.